Through their adventures, Ripley discovers startling truths about how attitudes, parenting, and rigorous teaching have revolutionized these countries’ education results.In The Smartest Kids in the World, Ripley’s astonishing new insights reveal that top-performing countries have achieved greatness only in the past several decades; that the kids who live there are learning to think for themselves, partly through failing early and often; and that persistence, hard work, and resilience matter more to our children’s life chances than self-esteem or sports.Ripley’s investigative work seamlessly weaves narrative and research, providing in-depth analysis and gripping details that will keep you turning the pages. Written in a clear and engaging style, The Smartest Kids in the World will enliven public as well as dinner table debates over what makes for brighter and better students.

    Terms and phrases such as "the global village" and "the medium is the message" are now part of the lexicon, and McLuhan's theories continue to challenge our sensibilities and our assumptions about how and what we communicate.There has been a notable resurgence of interest in McLuhan's work in the last few years, fueled by the recent and continuing conjunctions between the cable companies and the regional phone companies, the appearance of magazines such as WiRed, and the development of new media models and information ecologies, many of which were spawned from MIT's Media Lab. In effect, media now begs to be redefined. In a new introduction to this edition of Understanding Media, Harper's editor Lewis Lapham reevaluates McLuhan's work in the light of the technological as well as the political and social changes that have occurred in the last part of this century.

    From the classroom to the courtroom and from financial markets to supermarkets, Mlodinow's intriguing and illuminating look at how randomness, chance, and probability affect our daily lives will intrigue, awe, and inspire.

    Numerous examples throughout the book show students what should and should not be done when writing reviews.- Emphasizes critical analysis of reports of empirical research in academic journals--making it ideal as a supplement for research methods courses. This book makes it possible for students to work independently on a critical literature review as a term project.- Nine model literature reviews at the end of the book provide the stimulus for homework assignments and classroom discussions.- The activities at the end of each chapter keep students moving toward their goal of writing a polished, professional review of academic literature.- Most examples include material from recently published research. Includes nine model literature reviews for discussion and evaluation.Table of ContentsChapters1 Writing Reviews of Academic Literature: An Overview2 Considerations in Writing Reviews for Specific Purposes3 Selecting a Topic and Identifying Literature for Review4 General Guidelines for Analyzing Literature5 Analyzing Quantitative Research Literature6 Analyzing Qualitative Research Literature7 Building Tables to Summarize Literature8 Synthesizing Literature Prior to Writing a Review9 Guidelines for Writing a First Draft10 Guidelines for Developing a Coherent Essay11 Guidelines on Style, Mechanics, and Language Usage12 Incorporating Feedback and Refining the First Draft13 Preparing a Reference List14 Comprehensive Self-Editing Checklist for Refining the Final DraftModel Literature Reviews for Discussion and EvaluationReview A: Cyberbullying Among College StudentsJournal of School ViolenceReview B: Waterpipe Smoking Among College Students in the United StatesJournal of American College HealthReview C: The Effect of Student Discussion Frequency on Mathematics AchievementThe Journal of Experimental EducationReview D: Behaviors in Couples With a History of InfidelityJournal of Family PsychologyReview E: The Prevalence of Stalking Among College StudentsJournal of American College HealthReview F: School Social Workers' Experiences With Youth Suicidal BehaviorChildren & SchoolsReview G: Demographic and Academic Trends in Drinking Patterns and Alcohol-Related ProblemsJournal of Alcohol and Drug EducationReview H: Overnight Stays and Children's Relationships With Resident and Nonresident Parents After DivorceJournal of Family IssuesReview I: Language Brokering: An Integrative Review of the LiteratureHispanic Journal of Behavioral SciencesProfessor Reviews"Students have found Writing "Literature reviews one of the most helpful books.... Even students not in the course have gone to the bookstore looking for this book."-- Kathleen N. Bondy, University of Central Arkansas"Lucid, readable, and concise. Excellent detailed table of contents. Good full-length examples of literature reviews."-- Paul K. Dezendorf, East Carolina University"Excellent. A concise, 'task analytic' presentation of the complex steps necessary in writing literature reviews."-- Tom Cooke, Sonoma State University"Readable, concise, clear overview of the subject. My students rave about it. One said, 'I will keep this book for my whole master's [in nursing] program.'"-- Madge M. D

    The gift is a perfect example of what Mauss calls a total social phenomenon, since it involves legal, economic, moral, religious, aesthetic, and other dimensions. He sees the gift exchange as related to individuals and groups as much as to the objects themselves, and his analysis calls into question the social conventions and economic systems that had been taken for granted for so many years. In a modern translation, introduced by distinguished anthropologist Mary Douglas, The Gift is essential reading for students of social anthropology and sociology.

    Now, two science professors give us the tools to dismantle misinformation and think clearly in a world of fake news and bad data.It's increasingly difficult to know what's true. Misinformation, disinformation, and fake news abound. Our media environment has become hyperpartisan. Science is conducted by press release. Startup culture elevates bullshit to high art. We are fairly well equipped to spot the sort of old-school bullshit that is based in fancy rhetoric and weasel words, but most of us don't feel qualified to challenge the avalanche of new-school bullshit presented in the language of math, science, or statistics. In Calling Bullshit, Professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West give us a set of powerful tools to cut through the most intimidating data.You don't need a lot of technical expertise to call out problems with data. Are the numbers or results too good or too dramatic to be true? Is the claim comparing like with like? Is it confirming your personal bias? Drawing on a deep well of expertise in statistics and computational biology, Bergstrom and West exuberantly unpack examples of selection bias and muddled data visualization, distinguish between correlation and causation, and examine the susceptibility of science to modern bullshit.We have always needed people who call bullshit when necessary, whether within a circle of friends, a community of scholars, or the citizenry of a nation. Now that bullshit has evolved, we need to relearn the art of skepticism.

    Beyond their bestselling books, you know them from commentary and features in the New York Times, CNN, NPR, Time, Newsweek, Wired, New York, and more. E-mail, Facebook, and Twitter accounts are filled with demands to read their reporting (such as "How Not to Talk to Your Kids," "Creativity Crisis," and "Losing Is Good for You"). In Top Dog, Bronson and Merryman again use their astonishing blend of science and storytelling to reveal what's truly in the heart of a champion. The joy of victory and the character-building agony of defeat. Testosterone and the neuroscience of mistakes. Why rivals motivate. How home field advantage gets you a raise. What teamwork really requires. It's baseball, the SAT, sales contests, and Linux. How before da Vinci and FedEx were innovators, first, they were great competitors. Olympians carry Top Dog in their gym bags. It's in briefcases of Wall Street traders and Madison Avenue madmen. Risk takers from Silicon Valley to Vegas race to implement its ideas, as educators debate it in halls of academia. Now see for yourself what this game-changing talk is all about.

    But for those of us who left math behind in high school, the numbers and figures hurled at us as we go about our days can sometimes leave us scratching our heads and feeling as if we’re fumbling through a mathematical minefield. In this eye-opening and extraordinarily accessible book, mathemati­cian Kit Yates illuminates hidden principles that can help us understand and navigate the chaotic and often opaque surfaces of our world. In The Math of Life and Death, Yates takes us on a fascinating tour of everyday situations and grand-scale applications of mathematical concepts, including exponential growth and decay, optimization, statistics and probability, and number systems. Along the way he reveals the mathematical undersides of controversies over DNA testing, medical screening results, and historical events such as the Chernobyl disaster and the Amanda Knox trial. Readers will finish this book with an enlightened perspective on the news, the law, medicine, and history, and will be better equipped to make personal decisions and solve problems with math in mind, whether it’s choosing the shortest checkout line at the grocery store or halting the spread of a deadly disease.

    Or the "Phantom of Fine Hall," a figure many students had seen shuffling around the corridors of the math and physics building wearing purple sneakers and writing numerology treatises on the blackboards. The Phantom was John Nash, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of his generation, who had spiraled into schizophrenia in the 1950s. His most important work had been in game theory, which by the 1980s was underpinning a large part of economics. When the Nobel Prize committee began debating a prize for game theory, Nash's name inevitably came up—only to be dismissed, since the prize clearly could not go to a madman. But in 1994 Nash, in remission from schizophrenia, shared the Nobel Prize in economics for work done some 45 years previously.Economist and journalist Sylvia Nasar has written a biography of Nash that looks at all sides of his life. She gives an intelligent, understandable exposition of his mathematical ideas and a picture of schizophrenia that is evocative but decidedly unromantic. Her story of the machinations behind Nash's Nobel is fascinating and one of very few such accounts available in print (the CIA could learn a thing or two from the Nobel committees).

    And because you’re already more attuned to your physical and emotional needs, and more inclined to commit to a healthier lifestyle, you're poised to live brilliantly for the thirty-plus years after menopause. All you need now is the program outlined in Younger Next Year for Women—which, for starters, will help you avoid literally 70 percent of the decay and eliminate 50 percent of the injuries and illnesses associated with getting older. How? Drawn from disciplines as varied as evolutionary biology, cell physiology, experimental psychology and anthropology, the science behind Younger Next Year is clear. Our bodies are programmed to do one of two things: either grow or decay. Sitting in front of a screen all day tells the body to decay. Taking a walk or doing yoga tells the body to grow. Loneliness and stress trigger decay; love and laughter trigger growth. Just as clear as the science is the goal: Become the active gatekeeper of your own body and gain the power to control those signals of growth and decay. Seven simple rules show the way, from #1 Exercise six days a week for the rest of your life, to #6 Care, to #7 Connect and commit. They’re called Harry’s Rules, named for the doctor and coauthor—Henry S. Lodge, M.D.—who formulated them, and who explains the precise science behind each one. But since it’s one thing to know something’s good for you and quite another to put it into practice, Dr. Lodge, the scientist, is joined by Chris Crowley—coauthor, exhorter and living example—whose brusque charm and infectious enthusiasm will actually have you living by the rules. So, congratulations. You’re now about to get younger.

    “Big data” refers to our burgeoning ability to crunch vast collections of information, analyze it instantly, and draw sometimes profoundly surprising conclusions from it. This emerging science can translate myriad phenomena—from the price of airline tickets to the text of millions of books—into searchable form, and uses our increasing computing power to unearth epiphanies that we never could have seen before. A revolution on par with the Internet or perhaps even the printing press, big data will change the way we think about business, health, politics, education, and innovation in the years to come. It also poses fresh threats, from the inevitable end of privacy as we know it to the prospect of being penalized for things we haven’t even done yet, based on big data’s ability to predict our future behavior.In this brilliantly clear, often surprising work, two leading experts explain what big data is, how it will change our lives, and what we can do to protect ourselves from its hazards. Big Data is the first big book about the next big thing.www.big-data-book.com

    And every Star Trek fan knows about Klingon, which was nothing more than a television show's attempt to create a tough-sounding language befitting a warrior race with ridged foreheads. But few people have heard of Babm, Blissymbolics, and the nearly nine hundred other invented languages that represent the hard work, high hopes, and full-blown delusions of so many misguided souls over the centuries. In In The Land of Invented Languages, author Arika Okrent tells the fascinating and highly entertaining history of man's enduring quest to build a better language. Peopled with charming eccentrics and exasperating megalomaniacs, the land of invented languages is a place where you can recite the Lord's Prayer in John Wilkins's Philosophical Language, say your wedding vows in Loglan, and read Alice's Adventures in Wonderland in Lojban. A truly original new addition to the booming category of language books, In The Land of Invented Languages will be a must-have on the shelves of all word freaks, grammar geeks, and plain old language lovers.

    In the intervening years, Herman’s volume has changed the way we think about and treat traumatic events and trauma victims. In a new afterword, Herman chronicles the incredible response the book has elicited and explains how the issues surrounding the topic have shifted within the clinical community and the culture at large. Trauma and Recovery brings a new level of understanding to a set of problems usually considered individually. Herman draws on her own cutting-edge research in domestic violence as well as on the vast literature of combat veterans and victims of political terror, to show the parallels between private terrors such as rape and public traumas such as terrorism. The book puts individual experience in a broader political frame, arguing that psychological trauma can be understood only in a social context. Meticulously documented and frequently using the victims’ own words as well as those from classic literary works and prison diaries, Trauma and Recovery is a powerful work that will continue to profoundly impact our thinking.

    Now that machine learning is thriving, even programmers who know close to nothing about this technology can use simple, efficient tools to implement programs capable of learning from data. This practical book shows you how.By using concrete examples, minimal theory, and two production-ready Python frameworks—Scikit-Learn and TensorFlow—author Aurélien Géron helps you gain an intuitive understanding of the concepts and tools for building intelligent systems. You’ll learn how to use a range of techniques, starting with simple Linear Regression and progressing to Deep Neural Networks. If you have some programming experience and you’re ready to code a machine learning project, this guide is for you.This hands-on book shows you how to use:Scikit-Learn, an accessible framework that implements many algorithms efficiently and serves as a great machine learning entry pointTensorFlow, a more complex library for distributed numerical computation, ideal for training and running very large neural networksPractical code examples that you can apply without learning excessive machine learning theory or algorithm details

    A meld of history and science, this book is a group portrait of some of the greatest minds who ever lived as they wrestled with nature’s most sweeping mysteries. The answers they uncovered still hold the key to how we understand the world.At the end of the seventeenth century—an age of religious wars, plague, and the Great Fire of London—when most people saw the world as falling apart, these earliest scientists saw a world of perfect order. They declared that, chaotic as it looked, the universe was in fact as intricate and perfectly regulated as a clock. This was the tail end of Shakespeare’s century, when the natural land the supernatural still twined around each other. Disease was a punishment ordained by God, astronomy had not yet broken free from astrology, and the sky was filled with omens. It was a time when little was known and everything was new. These brilliant, ambitious, curious men believed in angels, alchemy, and the devil, and they also believed that the universe followed precise, mathematical laws—-a contradiction that tormented them and changed the course of history.The Clockwork Universe is the fascinating and compelling story of the bewildered geniuses of the Royal Society, the men who made the modern world.